The Frog Princess: A Tlingit Legend from Alaska

Kimmel, Eric A, illustrated by Rosanne Litzinger. The Frog Princess: A Tlingit Legend from Alaska. New York: Holiday House, 2006. Print.

Kimmel, Eric A, and Rosanne Litzinger. The Frog Maiden: A Tlingit Legend from Alaska. New York: Holiday House, 2005. Print.

Smelcer, John E. A Cycle of Myths: Native Legends from Southeast Alaska. Anchorage: Salmon Run Book, 1993. Print.

Johnson, Andrew P. Kiksadi Dog Salmon Legend. Anchorage, Alaska: Alaska Bilingual Education Center of the Alaska Native Education Board, 1975. Print.

The Girl Who was Taken by the Frog People" in John E. Smelcer's collection A Cycle of Myths: Indian Myths from the Southeast Alaska (Anchorage: Salmon Run Press, 1993).
Tlingit Myths and Tests (Bureau of American Ethnology, 1909).

Grimm, Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm, and Fanu B. Le. The Frog Prince and Other Stories from Grimm's Fairy Tales. London: Review of Reviews Office, 1897. Print.

Synopsis: Suitor after suitor travels to the Tlingit (KLINK-it) village hoping to marry the headman's beautiful daughter, but she says she'd rather marry a frog from the lake than any of those men. Then, later she gets a visit from a poor, strange yet handsome man. He asks her to accompany him to the lake and he leads the way into the water, taking hold of the water as if it were a blanket, down a long staircase where she meets the king of the frogs and the frog people. She finds the Frog People all very handsome. She enjoys her visit and eventually stays.
Meanwhile, the princess' father is besides himself with grief at the loss of his princess. He doesn't know where she's gone until he gets a message from a man who tells the king that he heard a woman's voice singing by the water. The king goes to find out the she is with the frogs. He demands her return, but the frog people say she is happy there and has married and has children. But the king threatens to come and destroy the frog kingdom, so they return the princess. But she is sad. She seems like she is in good health, "though her eyes bulged slightly and her fingers had grown unusually long." She doesn't speak, so the king elicits the help of a special healer who cooks a stew for her. When she eats it, she throws up what's been inside her -things that frogs would eat. She regains her voice, but says to her father that she was happy there and wants to return. Her father tells her she cannot. Then one day, the princess returns to the frog people and all the frog kingdom moves so that the king cannot find them. But one day a man hears a song near a lake and a the princess tells him to let her father know that she is happy and she is with her husband and her children. So the man goes and tells the king. The man went back but did not see her again. He rested on the bank of the water, the frogs croaked and peeped , as frogs do, but when he shut his eyes and listened closely, he understood what they were saying because they were speaking Tlinglit.


I would probably tell this more like a literary tale, staying very close to the written story in order to respect the storytelling traditions of the Tlingit people.
This would be interesting for children through adults. It would useful in the language learning classroom, just to discuss feelings about what it means to leave one's world behind (forever) to live in another culture/environment. Analogies can be drawn to the challenges of living in a different culture for school/work/long-term.

The author heard this on his first visit to Sitka, Alaska in 1995. It's a transformation tale from human to animal and animal to human. Another group of transformation stories are the "Beauty and the Beast" stories, like, "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" [Sherman, Josepha., eds. Once Upon A Galaxy. Little Rock : August House, 1994.]